Granola

I had lunch with my mother yesterday. She looked at me and exclaimed (EXCLAIMED) “Are you wearing makeup?” She then perused my face with deep concentration and listed the items that I was wearing “Eyeliner, mascara, eye-shadow.” Uh mom, I’m 27 and I do wear makeup and I have for quite some time.

Now I realize that I’m not a granola type girl but I think I would be considered low maintenance on the fah-fah quotient. (Definition of fah-fah: those girls who must go through many hours of prepping themselves to be seen by the general public, this usually includes hair styling beyond brushing, products, makeup when you are planning of sweating, etc.) I am not fah-fah but I do realize that you can be just as wrong on the other side of the spectrum. I think that for the most part I am a nice compromise between being dressy and casual. I like to dress up and I like casual. With my new found skirtability I am actually quite adept at being dressed up now and carrying on with my normal business.

This reminds me of a story. Actually it doesn’t but I’ve wanted to share this story and there is no real segue that will lead me there. So enjoy and share in my life:

Ohhhhhh, an Austrian went yodeling on a mountain top high when along came a crazy girl interrupting his cry and that girl was me, but we weren’t in Austria, and there was no yodeling, some whittling but no yodeling.

I worked at a sports camp for 6 years and lived in a teepee. Not a real honest to goodness teepee but about as close as you can get before OSHA and child protective services comes a knocking. I’ve sweated my fair share of sweat, I’ve gone a good few days without showering, and I’ve lived in camp gear for an entire summer. People this is low maintenance living here. I’ve gone camping, not the camping where you stay in a mobile home but the kind where you sleep in tents or on the ground itself. I’ve roughed it.

Or at least I thought I had, then the summer of 03 came around and I went backpacking. This is roughing it. My sweet roomie Jessica encouraged me to go so off I went with the youth group I was working with to traipse through Estes Park, Colorado.

Here is a somewhat shortened narrative of highlights. Mind you these are all about me because this is my blog. If you want information on other people go read their blogs.

Burn ban
Those were infamous words for that trip. See we had to change locations from our original spot because of the wild fires and then the burn ban meant that we packed out what we packed in. I’ll spell it out for you: anything, ANYTHING, we brought on the trail with us went back off the trail with us: trash, leftover food, used toiletry items. Now you get the picture. Let’s just say it was a eye opening experience.

Duct Tape
Another big phrase for me this trip. Did you know duct tape can take the place or an ace bandage? It can and it did. See I have these trick ankles. They have a tendency to fail. Now just in case you were wondering ankles are very important to walking. Try it sometime without yours. Yep, I saw you fall down.

And fall is what I did. Many times. Too many times. I fell first when we came down from a mini-hike at our first campsite. It was starting to rain and we were hurrying down from our peak to our nice dry tents. I was a little slow, people I have asthma and well I’m not a fast walker at high altitudes. This was my first time hiking for real, not that wussy day hiking where you just walk around the national park in your boots and gnaw on beef jerky and trail mix and talk about nature. You are not hiking, you’re walking, you’re gazing, and you’re a wuss. We were hiking, heavy packs, no car to go to when it rains, no toilets. Real hiking. So my ankle choose this moment to fail me and down I went and hard. See I was worried about he lightening. Yep you read that right, the lightening. People we were in the clouds and when you’re standing on a mountaintop you are the biggest target for those flashy bolts of fiery hot electricity. So I was running, or at least what running looks like when your wheezing and slow and I bit it hard. So there goes ankle trick #1. I was wet in pain and now wheezing, slow, and limping. We made it back to camp and I took a nap. Hmmm nap good, ankle bad.

So I quickly recovered from that ankle fiasco. I’m a quick healer. Well not really but I’m hard headed and stubborn and I wasn’t going to let a rolled ankle get me down. So we went on and started hiking to our new campsite. We had to pass the main park entrance and walk pass what Matt Hilliard called “fairy day hikers”. Some of these people were actually in skirts and heels, SKIRTS and HEELS. People you are at a national park, the outdoors, hiking (wuss hiking that is), you don’t wear skirts and heels. Some other people had walking sticks, yea you might need that for the 200 yards you covered on packed dirt walkways, or the backpack water camels, because that 200 yard walk really sucks your body of water so you want to make sure you have a gallon strapped to your back just in case dehydration start to set in. These people gave us the weirdest looks. I think they thought we were mountain people, or gypsies, or maybe transient discovers of the plains. I wanted to tell them we were part of the original Lewis and Clark expedition but we ended up in Canada so we hiked back down the Rocky Mountains. I’m serious it was as if they had never seen real hikers before.

Of course this would be the moment that my ankle decided to stage a coup and revolt from the dictatorial rule of walking with your legs and feet in unison. We were walking, just walking, one foot in front of the other, normal flat ground and bam I went down. I went down hard and everyone knew it. We were walking in a line and all of a sudden I was done. I think I may have yelped (not a scream but a definite vocalization of the pain I was experiencing) and my group all stopped and I started asking them to help me up. Here is a tip, if you fall a lot on your ankle like I do, the first thing is to get up and moving, prevent the ankle from thinking it has won and walk it into submission. So that is what I did. While that happened the sweet high schoolers of my group began to divvy up everything in my pack. That was the kindest and most giving thing they could have done. They took on more weight so that I wouldn’t have any. I was very thankful and overwhelmed with gratitude. So we wrapped it with duct tape. See I brought you back to my thought earlier. That is good story telling there.

But I’m not done. So we hiked all day that day, meaning I hiked on my painful ankle all day. It was what hikers (or at least the ones I was with) called a “grunt”. A “grunt” is a long day of hiking where you change your altitude greatly, i.e. we went a long ways and up most of the ways, way up in fact. So we get to the camp site and I’m doing good. I was so tired that I was practically running down this embankment to just get to a place where I could sit down. It was a long day. We made camp and that night I couldn’t sleep. My foot was killing me so I woke early in the morning and went in search of a knife to cut off this duct tape that was now strangling my foot. My toes were huge Vienna sausages and my calf looked like it could belong to Eddie. The fluid that would have normally caused my ankle to swell was directed elsewhere by the tourniquet that choked the life out of my ankle. So after slicing the duct tape off with the precision of a woman in pain my ankle let out a sigh of relief and resumed blood flow to my now purplish tinted foot.

Off the beaten path
We enjoyed the wilderness for another day or so. Then we had our final hike to go home. I was of course at the back of the pack: ankle, asthma, slow. I thought I was following the trail correctly but alas I was off so I had to bush-wack my way back to the group and bush-wack I did, or at least a bush wacked me and made me bleed. I ran into and through some kind of thorny bushy branches and tore up my leg. So here I am hobbling along, wheezing, and without the use of a proper toilet, or any toilet for that matter, for many days and now blood is trickling down my leg. Once again I was assisted by the medical supplies. I think I was the sole user of the medical supplies, in fact this injury used up the last of our gauze, tape, and antibiotic ointment. So we stumbled out of the wilderness, a little worse for wear but successful.

Now for a normal person this would be the end of the story but, when it comes to me, of course I have much more to share and it only gets better.


Sunburn and some puffiness
After our wondrous week on the mountain (I really did enjoy it and would love to go again) and a long, long shower we packed up and headed off to go river rafting. Now realize that there was a significant drought in Colorado so rafting is the correct word to use for what we did but rafting rapids is not quite correct. It was more like rafting the lazy river than rafting the wave pool. We paddled and paddled and paddled and paddled, and then we paddled some more. We were on the water for 4 hours. FOUR HOURS. Normally the rafting takes 2 hours but with no water and no rapids, it was a much much longer trip. So of course most of us neglected to put on sunscreen. BIG MISTAKE. When we finally made shore I was as red as a tomato and baked to a crisp. I was also suffering from a chronic toothache that had started on the trail but I had treated with advil and forgot.

So we changed back into normal clothes and headed off to eat dinner. As I sat at dinner I began to feel funny. Was it the sunburn, did I have sun poisoning? Or maybe it was my toothache with was coming back with a vengeance. I went to the bathroom and while checking out my nice red face I realized that the right side of my face was a little, well, fat. I hurried back to the table to get a second opinion and Matt concurred and mentioned the fact that abscessed teeth often cause swelling. Oh and do they. For the rest of the trip home I consumed a whole lot of Aleve and continued to swell up like a chipmunk. The pain was excruciating. I really have never had anything quite like it and my face was swelling into a scary looking Halloween mask. My right eye was swelled shut. My cheek was at least 2 to 3 times its original size and I was pretty much horrible looking. It was an interesting experience. Just so you know it was an abscess. I was on Vicodin for a few days and penicillin and then I had a major root canal. I still have a picture of me from that time and I keep it in case I ever think that any of my self worth is in the way I look.

So that was my hiking trip. It was amazing. I loved it and would love to go back. I really do like nature and getting away from the craziness of life but it was one roller coaster for my body and health. But I survived.